iPhone OS 3.0 Announcement – March 17, 2009

First off, this is not the release of Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0. Some people have taken it as a sign that it would be released then. What it is, is a media event where Apple is going to discuss the iPhone OS 3.0, which should be a very significant upgrade. A lot of us with smartphones have been interested in some kind of tethering plan for laptops/notebooks, and it could be announced then.

There will be a look at the new OS, and a look at the Software Development Kit (SDK aka devkit). The SDK has apparently undergone several changes as well. According to Engadget, Apple is calling this an “advance preview of what we’re building”

It’ll be at 10am PST (1PM EST, 12PM CST).

Potential features: – Possible Push Notification – MMS Messaging Support – Tethering to laptops/notebooks/etc. (allowing those devices to share the iPhones data connection) – 3rd party applications running in the background (which could be take the place of push notification) – GPS upgrades

Out of those three, I would say tethering will happen for sure – back in November, AT&T mentioned that official iPhone tethering plans were being worked on. They were firm on that. The functionality was there if you were willing to “jailbreak” your iPhone as it is. AppleInsider reports that it will use Bluetooth on the iPhone, attaching to a USB device on a computer, and that AT&T would be offering a new/separate contract for such tethering. This would be in addition to the contract for unlimited on-device browsing (since a laptop/notebook could pull down much more data over AT&T’s 3G and Edge networks than an iPhone could in normal or even semi-heavy use).